By Ivan Sanchez
The US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs threw US politics into turmoil with multiple states, including Tennessee, banning abortions and removing female bodily autonomy. The backlash against the Supreme Court decision has been immense, and abortion foes have been defeated in every ballot initiative since Dobbs.
In 2022, voters established a constitutional right to abortion in California, Michigan and Vermont. They also rejected ballot measures in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana that attempted to restrict abortion rights access. In the same year, in what was expected by many pundits to be a Republican wave year, US house race losses were kept to a minimum and Democrats added a senator in Pennsylvania.
2023 showed voters continued to be furious about abortion restrictions. In Wisconsin, Democrats flipped control of the state Supreme Court while in the South they regained control of Virginia’s House of Delegates and enshrined abortion rights into the Ohio constitution.
The presidential election in 2024 will also feature abortion rights initiatives in multiple states. Maryland and New York will both pose voters amend the constitutions of their respective states to enshrine abortion rights. Other states including Colorado, Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, and Washington are all in various stages of putting ballot measures up to enshrine abortion rights in state law or in their constitutions.
Iowa legislators are planning to ask voters to amend their state constitution to hold that nothing in the document supports abortion rights. This is like the attempt in Kentucky that failed with voters in 2022.
The one bright spot for abortion foes may comes from the increasingly conservative US Supreme Court where they are discussing whether to revoke FDA approval of mifepristone, an abortion inducing drug that is currently used in most abortions in the United States.
Abortion rights have proven to be a weight around the Republican Party with former Governor Nikki Haley striking a more conciliatory tone toward pro-choice America and arguing that a middle ground needed to be found. This tone is one that is being echoed in polling. A Gallup poll in May 2023 found that 34 percent of voters believed that abortion should be legal under any circumstances and 51 percent believed that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances.
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